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PeoplesGist.com celebrates the success and growth of the music download site, Founder of NotjustOk Ademola Ogundele, on the site decided to share the story of how Notjustok has Progressed with Joy since founding it in 2006.
Below is the full interview and success story of the Founder of NotjustOk Ademola Ogundele.
My Name is Ademola Ogundele and I am here to share my story of how Notjustok has Progressed with Joy since founding it in 2006.
Notjustok went from a passionate hobby of mine to a household name in the Nigerian and African music space. It truly disrupted the Nigerian music landscape, forcing artists to rethink how they promote their music, from the old “direct to radio first” model to an “online first” model.
The reason Notjustok is popular today is because of the success of the Music from Nigeria. When I started posting Nigerian music on Notjustok, the only reason I was able to stay consistent after God’s grace, were the fuel of emotions generated in me when I heard the good music I listened to and my ability to enjoy the process of sharing and attempting to popularize the music I shared.
Here is a short story of how Notjustok has progressed with Joy from 2006 to 2016.
1. Hobby
Notjustok started in 2006 as a hobby where I would post content I felt was interesting once a week and share my thoughts and experiences (I thought were very interesting and unique) with the then 10 people audience that were made up of my siblings and friends whom I forced to read my content.
Later that year I stumbled upon Nigerian music that was being made around that period and immediately started to enjoy it and appreciated the quality.
At this time, I was simply enjoying the fact that I could express myself through writing.
2. Passion for Music
As I listened to Nigerian music more and more I began to hear the mix of contemporary production with local language and expression and it was meshing well. Artists like eLDee, Naeto C, Ikechukwu, Dbanj, Don Jazzy and 9ice were beginning to become quite popular and my God, I loved every song they were releasing.
In June 2008, a website streamed the video of Mandela’s 90th birthday UK concert LIVE online. I was determined to capture 9ice’s LIVE performance of Gongo Aso at the concert in London using an application on my battered and overheated Dell laptop; still don’t know how I managed to get the laptop to download the software and record just the portion of 9ice’s performance.
Anyway, I shared the video on Notjustok.typepad.com which is where the site was back then and the number of people that came to the site that day were 1000% more than normal. After this pleasant response, my passion for Nigerian music grew even more and I felt I had the responsibility to keep feeding the people Nigerian music online. My dedication grew immediately and my brain started to come up with all sorts of ideas for the future.
3. An Audience online for Nigerian Music and “No” Couldn’t Stop The Passion
After sharing 9ice’s performance video with the Notjustok Audience, I knew that I had to keep sharing more Nigerian music content. The passion for both the music and sharing it drove me to track down ALL the Nigerian artists I could find on Myspace and Facebook.
Although many of them did not respond to my messages, I found a way to keep getting their new music via forums, myspace pages and ripping mp3s via weird sites on the internet. I felt I needed to be consistent with sharing music; there was an innate joy I felt when I posted and saw the responses of the people.
4. Friend’s Opinions and Perception
At this time, I still had a full time job and usually worked on Notjustok at night and sometimes didn’t sleep at night because I was looking for content or was posting it on the site. The vision and passion of what notjustok would look like in a few years, brought joy out of me and this drove me day and night during this period.
However, as a 27 year old male that was not getting paid for doing this passionate work, I was considered a fool or time waster by many of my friends close to me at the time; they thought it was a phase in my life and that I would wake up one day.
I could have advanced my career and risen up fast at the technology firm I was employed at, but I chose to put all my energy into building something that I loved to do, but was not making any money and frankly didn’t have a business plan to make money. I chose passion and purpose over money and status at the time. It made no logical sense.
5. Notjustok starts a Team
Late 2008, I accepted admission to start a graduate course in early 2009 and was concerned that I would not have enough time to post as consistently as I had been, so I hired Ovie, an equally passionate young man who had been sending me some good songs everyday as well. Prior to adding him to the team, this guy would send me good songs that I was not paying much attention to almost everyday and we started talking about music a lot.
At this point, I decided to start building a team, realizing that one person could not accomplish the vision I had and more immediately I knew that NOTJUSTOK had to keep feeding the people all the GOOD and HOT music from Nigeria consistently.
10 years later we have grown into a bigger Team filled with passionate Nigerian and African music lovers and attempting to continue add value to the space.
6. Attempting to Create Magic
After adding Ovie to the team in late 2008 and seeing his massive passion and joy for HOT Naija music, I saw an opportunity to create magic.
I wanted every person that visited the Notjustok site to feel like we were creating magic by consistently releasing a lot of new, GOOD and HOT music every single day. I wanted the audience to question if we were humans that actually slept at night.
The idea was to engage our audience daily with good content, have them share everything with their friend and leave their honest comments…
it worked because they shared and we found sometimes where posts had over 500 engaging and honest comments… our audience began to grow bigger and bigger everyday.
7. Artists Giving Us Exclusive Music
Our hardwork as a team, consistency and the fact that Notjustok made some artists popular online, caused many of the BIG artists to start sending Notjustok exclusive music; actually I take that back, we begged them for a lot of the exclusive music back then and they said YES because of the results they had seen us produce for some artists like
Wizkid,
M.I and others. Before you knew it, we started getting exclusive videos as well which we watermarked with our logo.
Believe it or not we did all this while not making any money and no one got paid, but the passion of the music and spreading it drove us along; the idea that Nigerian music would one day become easily available online drove me everyday and night. I realize that it was not logical but my gut feeling of the future and emotion from the music kept us up all night sometimes.
Because we started to get exclusive music, artists started sending all their fans to Notjustok and our audience got even bigger.
8. “Exclusive From Notjustok.com”
via GIPHY
After a while we were forced to create the viral voicetag “Exclusive from notjustok” which was done solely because we noticed that other sites were stealing our hard earned exlcusive music and placing it on their sites without giving credit.
Here is how it started; one day we received a
Wande Coal track titled
You Bad off is Mushin To Mohits debut album and we knew we couldn’t have other sites take this track and make it seem like they originated it online, so I created a voice tag on my laptop and pasted it into the song. I can’t lie there was a lot of excitement after I figured out how to add the voicetag. The idea was that if the other sites that stole the song did not want to give us credit, then they had to carry the ‘NOTJUSTOK’ brand with the music they were stealing from us and YES it worked.
This is where everything went National; come to find out that not only were other sites downloading from notjustok.com, Radio Stations across the country from Lagos to Abuja to Ogbomosho and PortHarcourt were also doing the same, 98% of all the DJs were also getting music from notjustok and all the songs playing in clubs across the country had the “Exclusive from Notjustok” voice tags embeded in them. We had become a national HIT.
9. Notjustok Disrupted Music Releases
Partly because of Notjustok’s push to make Nigerian Music ubiquitous online we caused some damage; most music from Nigeria is now released online first as opposed to Radio first. Because of the easy availability of Nigerian music, it has now spread across the globe and is growing to become a force worldwide considering the success and international recognition of artists such as Wizkid and Davido.